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I like this comment:
The economic platform most voters seem to want is lower taxes (or lower taxes on everyone except the “rich”), more jobs, more government benefits, and no deficits. Which, come to think of it, was Obama’s platform in 2008. The only problem is that it can’t be done, which makes it hard to run on that platform two times in a row.
It’s from “Larry3435”, and is attached to a piece by Jennifer Rubin entitled Obama’s economic approach a dud with voters.
It is important for libertarians like me not to confuse a bunch of people who think we probably shouldn’t have very much more government than we can pay for with people who think we definitely should have a lot less government than we can pay for, which is what we libertarians reckon, among other things.
Still, it’s a start.
I usually agree with Roger Simon, but I have some points to pick with this attempt to compare Nixon with Obama:
“Now I realize the comparison is unfair to Nixon who, other than Watergate of course, was a pretty decent president. He and his cohort Henry Kissinger opened Red China and effectively changed history by triangulating the Soviet Union. What those two men did helped lead to the diminution of Maoism as well and probably saved a huge number of lives. Tricky Dick also ratified the first, and ultimately most significant, U. S. environmental legislation, the kind that actually had a positive effect on the air and water, as opposed to the destructive self-regarding nonsense we have today.”
Well, I suppose it is true that some of the regulation of pollution and so on did some good, and yes, the China issue was played fairly well. But this article commits a sin of ommission: there is no mention whatever of the abandonment of the gold link to the dollar (admittedly, the link was a mere formality by the early 70s anyway, but still) and the institution of price controls, a pure example of King Canute Economics.
Nixon was not as evil as he is portrayed, maybe, and it is true that he pissed off a lot of the right people, but he also pissed off a lot of the wrong ones as well. I think that is possibly where Obama has a common bond. Not only has The One done things guaranteed to annoy conservatives, he hasn’t exactly been a great liberal president in the best use of that word, either.
Recent posting at WUWT?
Gordon J. Fulks:
We learned over the weekend that chemist Nickolas Drapela, PhD has been summarily fired from his position as a “Senior Instructor” in the Department of Chemistry. The department chairman Richard Carter told him that he was fired but would not provide any reason. Subsequent attempts to extract a reason from the OSU administration have been stonewalled. Drapela appears to have been highly competent and well-liked by his students. Some have even taken up the fight to have him reinstated.
But the reason seems clear. Drapela is a climate skeptic.
Says commenter number one:
Green is the new McCarthy.
Except that I bet that more people have been fired by American universities for being climate skeptics than were ever fired for being Communists.
I favour a world in which people can be fired for any stupid reason at all, provided there is no contract saying otherwise. Employee beware. But this case does shine a bright light on what a huge industry-stroke-secular-religion Climate Catastrophism has become. The idea that the big money is all on the side of climate skepticism is ludicrous.
Who pays for Oregon State University? Do they know what they are paying for? Do they like it? Might they be persuaded to stop paying? Maybe if questions of that sort were asked loudly enough, and if they started to be answered, Drapela might get his job back.
“The late economist Mancur Olson has argued that economies tend to grow more slowly as rent-seeking coalitions become pervasive and ubiquitous, since they divert resources from wealth-creating to wealth-consuming uses. This is one reason, he argues, why the United States grew so rapidly in the nineteenth century, and why West Germany and Japan grew so rapidly in the two or three decades after World War II. At such times, these economies were open to investment and entrepreneurship, and, as a consequence, they enjoyed historically high rates of growth. With the passage of time, all of these systems were gradually encumbered by coalitions seeking benefits through the state. Political paralysis and slow growth, Olson argues, are by-products of political systems captured by rent-seeking coalitions. These groups, operating collectively, can block any overall effort to cut spending or to address the problems of deficits and debt.”
– James Piereson
Recently I wrote here about how the US Presidential campaign is hastening the end of the CAGW scare. One of the things I said in that piece was that I didn’t know if Romney intended to make a big issue out of the new energy sources that are now coming on stream in the USA. But, I argued, even if Romney’s only interest in enterprises like Solyndra is that they are corrupt and wasteful rackets for syphoning tax money into the pockets of Obama supporters, I argued that such policking would still have the effect of flagging up the CAGW argument, to the extreme disadvantage of those who still take the CAGW scare seriously.
The central problem for the CAGW team being that whereas until now, others have been trying to knock some sense into their heads, with little apparent success, now the CAGW team itself is going to have to convince a crucial cohort of American voters that CAGW is a problem, when those voters now mostly reckon that it is not. This the CAGW team will be totally unable to do, any more than they have convinced the people whom they describe as “deniers” to stop their complaining about all the dodgy “climate science” on which the CAGW scare has always depended. All that the CAGW people will do is publicise their failure so far to make any persuasive sense.
I learned today, from this article by Walter Russell Mead, that Team Romney is indeed well aware of how Team Obama’s fondness for Greenery has caused Team Obama to impede the development of new energy sources in the USA, and that Team Romney very much intends to make an issue of this.
Says Mead:
Republicans are seizing the opportunity to make energy politics a centerpiece of their campaign.
And then Mead links to an FT story which is behind a paywall, but also quotes from it, as now do I:
“Blue-collar voters were never that sold on environmental issues, and if some Democrats come across as not keen on economic development, it could lose them support here in Ohio,” he said.
Who “he” is there, I don’t know, not being able to read the previous bit of the FT piece that says this, and Mead himself doesn’t say. But I am sure that whoever he is, he is right.
Republicans, from Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential candidate, to the congressional leadership, have made Barack Obama’s alleged stifling of the energy industry a centrepiece of their campaigns this year. …
Mr Romney has said he will approve the Keystone XL pipeline as soon as he wins office and curb the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency.
So, it would appear that the intellectual pressure already being applied to the CAGW-ers is even greater than I said in my earlier piece. Good.
This is delicious about Professor Paul Krugman.
The president of Estonia chewed out Paul Krugman on Wednesday, using Twitter to call the Nobel Prize-winning economist “smug, overbearing & patronizing,” in response to a short post on Estonia’s economic recovery. Krugman’s 67-word entry, entitled “Estonian Rhapsody,” questioned the merits of using Estonia as a “poster child for austerity defenders.” He included a chart that, in his words, showed “significant but still incomplete recovery” after a deep economic slump.
This paragraph packs its own, statistically-deadly punch in the direction of the New York Times columnist:
Estonia, which in 2011 became the latest country to join the eurozone, has been heralded by some as an austerity success story. That year, it clocked a faster economic growth pace than any other country in the European Union, at 7.6 percent. Estonia is also the only EU member with a budget surplus, and had the lowest public debt in 2011 — 6 percent of GDP. Fitch affirmed its A+ credit rating last week.
Update: Dan Mitchell weighs in with some damning data of his own against Krugman.
Dr Fred Singer says that Mitt Romney should exploit the energy issue to get himself elected President of the United States. You don’t have to agree with everything Singer says nevertheless to be optimistic about the impact that the kind of arguments Singer refers to might have during the campaign. I basically agree with Singer. The new energy Singer refers to is such a huge economic open goal (as we here in the soccer mad UK would say), and at a time when the entire Western world needs economic open goals like almost never before, that not even Romney will be able to avoid at least aiming kicks in its general direction, even if for some reason or another he would rather not.
The economy is the basic issue in this Presidential election, as it almost always is. If you are happy about how well you and your loved ones and friends and neighbours are doing, you vote for the incumbent or his younger friend. If not, not.
Meanwhile, a vast apparatus of energy sabotage has been created, the excuse or the reason for that being that energy of the sort that the modern world likes will ruin the climate and destroy humanity, in accordance with the C(atastrophic) A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) story alluded to acronymically in the title of this posting. Only energy of the most non-energetic sort, such as solar panels and silly big propellers, should be allowed, say the CAGW-ers. President Obama either really believes all this CAGW stuff or has lots of supporters who really do believe it, or supporters who placed business bets at a time when they really did believe it, or when they reckoned that a lot of other idiots really did believe it, so Obama is now looking like a green saboteur himself.
It gets worse for Team Obama. Americans want their energy to stop being sabotaged into being much more expensive, and to go back to being cheap again. And, says Singer, new sources of non-green energy now coming on stream might make this happen. Singer’s argument may not be true, what with politicians being politicians, but it is at least plausible. Vast new underground oceans of stuff you can set fire to and power four wheel drive vehicles with have recently been discovered under America. Or, they have always known this stuff was there but now they also know how to suck it out. Or push it out. Or some such thing. The point is, here’s a potential economic bonanza. Do we bonanzify it and go with the flow? Or do we ignore it, to save the planet from climate doom? Although Team Obama has changed its tune about this new, bad, energetic type energy somewhat, it hasn’t changed it enough to be convincing. Fred Singer says Romney should talk up this new energy, and that if he does he will make Obama look an even bigger economic saboteur than he looks already.
According to Singer, not only is the story of the economy as it is now bad for Team Obama. So is the new story, of the economy as it might be. I agree with Singer. I think this is one of those situations where what the contending Presidential teams merely say might actually make a big difference. → Continue reading: Solyndra! Solyndra! How the US Presidential campaign is hastening the end of the CAGW scare
Tim Sandefur has done what looks like an excellent piece of historical detective work. He writes about some of the images that are sometimes brought up by those who want to claim that there was no real proof of any serious communist threat to the US and that Joe McCarthy was a deluded fool, etc, etc. The entry is quite a long one so it is worth reading over a coffee break. Here is how it kicks off:
“You’ve probably seen this amusing poster somewhere or other; a bookstore near my house has it displayed on the wall. It’s often cited as an example of Cold War hysteria—the evils of McCarthyism—how foolish our grandparents were, that they would believe such silliness! They must have been really backwards.”
We then are shown the supposedly sinister poster and told how it might have been created, and where from.
This period of US history fascinates me. When I was studying history at school and university, the standard line on the 1930s and subsequent decade and a half in the US was that a lot of the fears about the “Reds” were massively overblown, misused for various purposes, etc. And yet it turns out that even Joe McCarthy might have had a case, as our own Brian Micklethwait wrote some time ago.
It remains a notable fact of US politics that “socialist” is a pretty dire term of abuse. Even those who are, in my view, socialists – such as Barack Obama – seem to want to deny it.
A lot of people like the way Obama has governed less than they liked the idea of Obama governing.
– Michael Barone
If Obama loses – if – I think that will sum it all up very well. And if Obama does lose, we must all hope that Romney governing turns out better than the idea of Romney governing looks now.
I have been following the Brett Kimberlin case, much linked to of late by Instapundit, with interest, but with some confusion.
It is not that I consider exercises like Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day to be pointless. It is that I remain genuinely confused about what that point might be. Who, exactly, are we all trying to convince, and of what, exactly?
I get the impression that all those blogging about this do know their answers to this question, but to them, it’s obvious, and if they ever did spell it out, that was many days ago. So, what are those answers?
Kimberlin is a bad, bad man, who has a history of villainy generally, and in particular of trying to intimidate bloggers who point this fact out. So yes, the cost in potential intimidation from Brett Kimberlin of lots of us blogging about Brett Kimberlin is small, and all the smaller for lots and lots of us doing this, especially from a nice safe distance like from London. But what exactly does me mentioning the name of Brett Kimberlin, on the blog that I write for, accomplish?
Does it intimidate Brett Kimberlin himself, and thereby stop him intimidating any more bloggers and from intimidating any more the bloggers he is intimidating now? How? Isn’t Kimberlin rather pleased to have got up the noses of so many bloggers whom he already detests and despises, and turned into a minor internet celebrity like this?
Does it persuade the forces of law and order to stomp all over Kimberlin, more than they have been doing lately? Again, how?
Is the idea to show to mainstream Americans that the mainstream media are rubbish, for not mentioning this story? If so, what exactly is the plan for reaching mainstream America with this proposition?
Leading directly on from the previous question, is the idea to embarrass the mainstream media into mentioning the story? Their current opinion of all this is, presumably, that a lot of stupid right wing blogs are making a gigantic fuss about a small-time crook, who has gone some way towards rejoining polite society by making himself useful to the left-wing cause, which just goes to show that Kimberlin is doing something good, having annoyed all the right right wing nutters. And given that not even that opinion will find its way into the mainstream media any time soon, nothing much would seem to be being accomplished on that front either.
The pieces I have been reading during the last week or so have entirely convinced me that Brett Kimberlin is a bad man, and that those who support him with money, or who did once upon a time, are at best very stupid, and probably not at all stupid but very, very bad also, arguably even worse than Kimberlin himself, in particular Barbra Streisand and Brett Kimberlin’s evil and/or stupid aunt. My opinion of George Soros, to mention another Kimberliner, has gone done (even further). I had not realised until now quite what a brazen villain he is. But convincing someone like me of things as simple as these hardly amounts to much by way of an objective. I have no objection in principle to preaching to the choir. This can often be a very valuable exercise. I am positively asking for exactly such preaching now. But what valuable lesson might this particular chorister be learning from the Kimberlin affair, that I might otherwise have neglected? Or is it that all this just makes me … think about things?
Is it a case of all of the above? The matter is easily blogged about, fun to blog about, and will achieve a wide variety of relatively small but desirable things.
My questions are genuine, rather than sneeringly rhetorical. If I truly thought that Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day was pointless, I would not have mentioned it here at all. But, please somebody tell me why it is not pointless, and not perhaps even counter-productive on account of being so over-the-top for what it is actually accomplishing.
I am sure that our commentariat will have useful answers to offer me, and I look forward to reading them.
An article about how Washington DC and the surrounding area is booming on the back of government spending is creating a bit of a buzz. Grizzled veterans of lobby groups and the dynamics of how spending decisions are made will not be remotely surprised, of course. Even so, this is the sort of article that sums up so much that is bent out of shape of Western societies and their bloated public sectors. And it also highlights how, in such an economy, so many of those who call themselves “contractors” and “consultants” are in fact dependent to a significant degree on the taxpayer for funds, not on anything resembling laissez faire capitalism. (There are similarities with London and Brussels, of course, though in the case of London, it is not just the centre of political power, but of financial and other sorts of power too, such as in the arts and entertainment business).
And this quote is chilling, if it highlights where young people think the action is:
“Aside from its wealth, the single defining feature of über-Washington is its youth. Most of the people who have moved to Washington since 2006 have been under 35; the region has the highest percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds in the U.S. “We’re a mecca for young people,” Fuller says. One recent arrival says word has gotten out to new graduates that Washington is where the work is. “It’s a place where a liberal-arts major can still get a job,” she says, “because you don’t need a particular skill.””
Marvellous, as Clint Eastwood says in his movies.
Not being wise in the ways of Twitter, I am not sure where Mr Eugenides got this piece of simple but effective graphics, only that he either acquired it or created it, one way or another, and that I found out about it because it was one of David Thompson’s clutch of ephemera last Friday:
I recall reading in one of Professor Parkinson’s books, I think in his classic Parkinson’s Law, that people only find it easy to have strong opinions about sums of money, or circumstances generally, that are within their particular and usually rather limited range of experience. So it is that a local planning committee will spend an hour arguing about a cheap loft extension, while nodding through an entire hundred million quid power station without discussion. Something along those lines. True, I suspect. Certainly true of many people.
So, the thing to do, with these otherwise unimaginably huge sums of money that politicians are slinging around nowadays, to keep all their various financial plates on sticks spinning fast enough, is what is done here, in the above graphic. Divide them all by the same (very large) number, until the original numbers become regular numbers of the sort regular people can relate to, while the numbers all nevertheless retain their relative sizes, to each other. The essential nature of what is going on is thus laid bare, for people who might otherwise be blinded by all the zeros, and all those bewildering words ending in “-illion”.
I agree with Mr Eugenides. This is clever.
And no, he didn’t invent it. It’s been around for a while.
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